How to Use Chat Tags in your Live Chat Conversations

Live chat is the most preferred customer channel for sales and support as it is a real time way to engage with customers. 63% of consumers who used live chat on a website are likely to return to that site. It is also the popular lead generation channel for all types of businesses. But what is more important is to organize and follow up with the leads effectively.

Chat tags can be one of the best ways to organize conversations and for faster follow-ups. They segment the list of conversations into different categories to escalate it to the right team for carrying out further actions fast and effectively.

What are chat tags? Why are tags important?

Tags are labels that you assign to conversations after the end or during the chat sessions. Tags are typically used to categorize and organize all customer communication. You can use tags to add category and topic labels to your chats, such as feature-request or follow up. 

Tagging your chats makes it easier to analyze the chat traffic and helps you search or filter your chat transcript. 

The reasons why tags are important to use are as follows:

• Improve targeting – Chat tags help to target potential visitors and customers who try to reach out to you across multiple support channels.
• Segment visitors – Tagging helps to filter visitors according to the priority and initiate instant follow up as per the assigned tags. 
• Boost team productivity – Tags help to sort and organize chats on the basis of customer concerns, which saves time by taking immediate action to fix it.
• Nurture leads – With the help of tags, you can identify the leads who show interest in your brand so that it is easy to nurture them to convert them successfully.
• Reduce sales cycle – Escalating the conversations to the relevant time allows faster resolution and reduces the sales cycle.
• Improve customer retention – Being able to follow up faster with the customers improves customer satisfaction and they retain with your business for a longer time.

How to use chat tags for effective conversations 

Chat tags are helpful in labeling the conversations and improve the sales cycle. It acts as a catalyst in making conversions effective and delivering real time assistance. By learning the comment attached to the tag and pursuing the conversation help in closing sales successfully. 

Let us discuss how tags can be used to make chats more productive.

1. Prioritize your conversations with tags

At times, customers face a lot of issues while interacting with a brand. Live chat has overtaken other options as the most preferred channel for customer communication. Chat tags are a simple yet effective way to keep all your chats organized and prioritize them based on the issue raised by the customer. The note along with the tags define the urgency and what kind of follow up is required.

Using tags for conversations can be a vital part of your workflow, allowing you to do things like:

• Prioritize feature requests and find the top reasons your customers decline
• To resolve customer support issues faster and boost customer satisfaction
• To escalate the chats to the right team such as sales, support or product teams.
• Reducing the number of touchpoints by delivering the solution in the first contact itself
• Gauge the impact of bugs and issues and highlight common points of confusion

There are some issues that need immediate assistance and not being able to reach out to customers when they want means losing a customer, which has a negative impact on the brand value. With tags, you can define the priority of tasks and based on the urgency, the concerned team will approach the customers.

2. Segment your leads for faster follow-up

Segmentation develops a clear understanding of who your customers are and what they specifically want, you will be able to specifically target marketing and nurturing them. According to MarketingSherpa, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, due to the lack of lead nurturing. 

Without any kind of nurturing process, the customers that have engaged with you might drift away if they are not followed up at the right time. Tags help to segment your leads so that they are easily identified and followed up faster.  You can easily learn the concerns raised by the customers and define the right action to reduce the sales cycle.

Following up the segmented customers faster help businesses in the below-mentioned ways.

• Improve chances of sales conversions – When the chat is escalated to the relevant team the follow-up process is faster and effective, which increases sales.
• Nurture them by analyzing their interests – Knowing the chat category allows them to follow up better and nurture them through personalized conversation.
• Acquire new customers – When you know the visitors are new you promptly assist that that impacts customer satisfaction and add customers.
• CRM integration for direct data import –  You can integrate with your CRM so that entire data is automatically imported and the lead follow up process becomes faster for the respective teams. 

For example, tagging conversations based on the type of visitors will help to know when chats are initiated by new customers or the existing customers and who need more immediate assistance. Also, you can determine customer satisfaction for both the segments along with how it changes over time and correlate it to factors like response time or queue time.

3. Assign tags automatically to your chatbot conversations

Businesses are adopting AI chatbots to modernize customer communication as well as to improve internal processes. Business Insider report says, by 2023, over 80% of businesses are expected to have chatbots implemented. 

For a SaaS business, the key objective is ‘real time response’. By automating sales and support processes with chatbots, you can easily deliver instant assistance to your customers and engage them 24×7. 

Chatbots can be easily scalable to handle a large volume of chats but the caveat is that it becomes difficult to categorize the important conversations. While chat with a human agent helps to leave a tag to define a category, it is practically not possible to manually go through the bot conversations to identify the categories.

What you can do is – while designing the bot flow, based on the flow if a customer is reaching a certain point such as booking a demo or price inquiry, it is a lead for you and you can add a tag to the flow.

Tags can be added to different flow such as:

• Lead generation
• Follow-up
• Billing queries
• Demo request

4. Tags add context to the chats

Chat tags are best to control the mess brought in by overwhelming chats. Just imagine the large number of chats that businesses handle on a regular basis, conversation topics will easily be lost.

If the chat topics are not defined, you tend to lose valuable insights on what is the top discussion going on among your customers and miss the chance to obtain vital feedback about your overall brand.

Chat tags are a great way to keep all your chats and tickets organized. You can attach tags to specific chat that can be easily identified by the right team and quickly follow up with the customers. 

You can add a tag to the chat during the conversation. There is no such rule that says, tags are added at the end of the chat. You can add it during the chat session as the visitor will not be able to see it.

Pro tip: Agents should add tags when they are fresh in mind. You can tag anything that gives an easy message to understand.

5. Categorize the issues raised by the customers

One of the great benefits of using tags is that you will be automatically notified when a ticket is created. Based on the tickets custom reports are generated to deeply understand the pain points of the customers.

You learn which are the tags that are most popular amongst your customers or when a particular tag is used most? With the help of tags, you will be able to observe trends that will provide valuable insights such as:

• Commonly asked questions –  so that you can create some useful content online
• New feature requests – to be forwarded to the product team
• Transactional queries – billing, refund to be handled by the sales team
• Support issues of product demo – can be escalated the support team
• Urgent follow-up – reach out immediately

If you have the above five tags specified, it will be easy to identify the number of chats with each tag with the help of insights and you will come to know the specific customer issues.

Final thoughts

No matter if your business is small or big, an agent’s productivity matters for streamlining the business process. And anything that helps to improve it is time saver. Tags are one of the important parts that enable your agents: 

• To have personalized conversations
• Automate your conversations
• Close sales faster
• Deliver faster responses
• Improve customer service standards